Setting up your site to run regular WordPress Backups will take you a few minutes of work, but it can save you a ton of trouble.

Many WordPress users learnt this the hard way. One day their site goes down, and what seemed like a temporary glitch, turns out to be an all-out data loss situation.

Since it is now so easy to backup your website, there is no reason why you shouldn’t. But why are WordPress backups so important? Do not web hosting companies swear to take care of this?

Why Should You Run Regular WordPress Backups?

There is a long list of things that could bring down your website. Data loss in your webhost, a malware infection, your files getting hacked, etc. Sometimes, you may even install a plugin or theme that takes down your site.

Many web hosts promise data backups. But we (and many others) have found you cannot fully rely on these. Even when they do keep backups, it is jumbled up with the data of several other websites.

In many cases, when you do a restore from webhost backups, you still loose weeks or even months of work. And even then, you should be happy you were able to do some restore. There have been cases where a website gets lost and no one could do anything to get it back. Not the webhost, not the site owner.

Since it is now so easy to run regular WordPress backups, it makes sense to secure all the effort you put into creating your website by running regular WordPress backups and storing them away from your server.

What Method Should You Use For WordPress Backups

There are many who still prefer a manual backup process, where you download your site files and database into your computer from time to time.

At Fixrunner, we prefer automated backups. This way, you can use a plugin to run backups of your files and database according to a schedule you set.

In this guide, we will show you how to use the UpdraftPlus plugin (which we highly recommend) to run automated backups to a remote location.

We will also show how to perform manual WordPress backups to your computer, for those who prefer this option.

HOW TO BACKUP YOUR WORDPRESS WEBSITE

Your WordPress website is made up two major parts – your files, which include your themes, plugins, uploads, etc; and your database, which is used to store posts, pages, comments, users, etc.

A full backup of your site involves keeping a copy of both your files and your database in a remote location. In this guide, we will show you how to do this using two methods:

Using the UpdraftPlus backup plugin.

Manually backing up files and database to your computer.

Backing up your WordPress site with UpdraftPlus

Using UpdraftPlus, you can easily backup your site to remote locations such as Google Drive, Dropbox, Amazon S3, etc.

The free version comes with ample features to help you run WordPress backups. You would only need the paid version if you need special features like encryption.

UpdraftPlus creates backups of the files in your wp-content folder, which is the only folder you really need to backup. This folder contains your themes, plugins, uploads, and other files unique to your website. The other folders contain WordPress core files which you can always download from WordPress.org.

UpdraftPlus can be set to automatically backup your site according to a schedule, or you can directly run a backup using the interface.

Automatic Backups With UpdraftPlus

In this section, we will show you how to set UpdraftPlus to backup your Website to Google Drive once every week. Depending on how busy your site is, you may decide that backups should run more often. For example, if your site gets 20 new posts daily, you may choose to set the backup to run once every day.

For someone who adds two posts per month, setting the schedule to monthly might just be good enough.

Here’s how to set up scheduled WordPress backups:

First, you need to install the UpdraftPlus plugin.

To do this, login to your WordPress dashboard and go to Plugins > Add New.

Search for UpdraftPlus and click Install Now.

When the installation completes, click Activate.

Next, go to Settings > UpdraftPlus Backups.

Switch to the “Settings” tab.

Set the “Files” and “Database” backup schedule to weekly, and leave the number of backups retained set to 2.

Scroll down to the “Choose your remote storage” section and click on Google Drive. When it expands the Google Drive options, right-click on “Follow this link to your Google API console…” and select “Open in new tab”.

Next, click on the My Project dropdown and click the plus button to create a new project.

Name your project and click Create.

Click on the My Project dropdown and click the project you just created.

Click Enable API at the top of the screen. When the API library opens, click Drive API.

Next, click Enable.

Creating Credentials

To use the API you just enabled, you have to create credentials for it. These credentials are the actual information used to connect UpdraftPlus to Google drive.

To start this step, click on the Credentials tab on the left, click the Create Credential dropdown, and select “Help me choose”.

Select “Google Drive API” as the API you are using, select “Web browser (JavaScript)” as the place you would be calling the API from, select “User data” as the kind of data you would be accessing, and click What credentials do I need?

Next, enter a name you choose for your Oauth client. Under “Authorized Javasript origins”, enter the url of the site you want to backup with updraft.

To get your authorized redirect URI, switch to the tab where UpdraftPlus is open. You would find this in the Google Drive section. Copy this URI and paste it in your credential setup page.

After pasting the redirect URI, click Create client ID.

In the next step, enter a product name and click Continue.

Click Done to complete creation of your credential. You will be taken to a page listing your credentials.

Click on the credential you just created to reveal your “Client ID” and “Client Secret”.

Scroll to the bottom of the page, check the box to enable email notifications, and click Save Changes.

You would be prompted to authenticate Google Drive. Click on the authentication link.

If you are taken to Google login page, select the account you set up your credential with. Next, click Allow to authenticate UpdraftPlus.

After authenticating, you would be taken back to the plugin page and an authentication success message will be seen at the top of the screen. Also, your first backup would begin automatically.

And that’s it. You’ve successfully set UpdraftPlus to backup your WordPress files and database once every week.

A note about authentication: In some cases, when you try to authenticate, you get an error message like the one below.

To resolve this, click the Learn More link. In the next page, scroll to the “Apps for testing or personal use only” section and click the “Risky Access Permission By Unreviewed Apps” link. Lastly, click Join Group.

You can now go on to authenticate UpdraftPlus to use Google Drive.

Running a One-Time Backup Using UpdraftPlus

Beyond setting up a backup schedule, you may sometimes need to run a one-time backup of your site. For example, this would be necessary if you are about to make changes to your site that can break it.

To run a one-time backup with UpdraftPlus, go to Settings > UpdraftPlus Backups